'Vicksburg 1863' by Winston Groom: turning point in Civil War

May 02, 2009|By Eric Banks, SPECIAL TO TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS

"Vicksburg 1863"

By Winston Groom

Alfred A. Knopf, 482 pages, $30

For fans of dramatic, game-changing Civil War battles won by a combination of deft genius, gallantry and gumption, the Battle of Vicksburg is a yawner. "Battle" is largely a misnomer -- the engagement that at last captured the city for the Union on July 4, 1863, was a good-old-fashioned siege, a 47-day-long encirclement of the town marked more by grind-it-out attrition than by derring-do strategy. If the story of the war in the Mississippi Valley were a long novel, Vicksburg would be the clenching sentence ("Reader, they surrendered.")

Still, for its lack of the mythic battlefield drama of Chancellorsville or Antietam, the town's capitulation was no less decisive, and in "Vicksburg 1863," Winston Groom argues that the culminating scene in Grant's nearly two-year-long campaign to take the city was the most important in the war's outcome. "To [Union general-in-chief] Henry Halleck's pronouncement that the conquest of Vicksburg was 'worth forty Richmonds,' he might have added 'forty Gettysburgs' as well," Groom writes. "Momentous as that bloody encounter was, it was basically a large raid, and aside from the appalling casualties that the South could ill afford to lose Gettysburg had settled nothing."

In Groom's story, the startling Confederate victories of Robert E. Lee in the East might as well have been taking place on the moon. President Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant knew Vicksburg was paramount. Situated on 20-story-high bluffs that overlooked a hairy serpentine bend on the Mississippi, Vicksburg -- famously compared to Gibraltar by Lincoln -- stood as a sentinel blocking the Union's use of the river as a watery superhighway to export all the products of the Midwest. As long as the Confederacy held the port city, it could strangle the farm economies in the North, bottle up their export and prolong the war -- the run-out-the-clock page in the Southern playbook.

Though "Vicksburg 1863" is Groom's fifth non-fiction work of military history, he's still better known as the author of the novel "Forrest Gump." But his mastery of plot and storytelling leaves him inordinately well-disposed to piece together the tangled mass of major battles and peashooter skirmishes, the strikingly modern feats of civil engineering and naval technology, that made up the Vicksburg campaign. His quick portraits of the war's players, from Lincoln and Jefferson Davis down to average Vicksburgers, are acutely rendered.

Nowhere, though, is Groom more successful than in describing the harsh, boggy, jungly conditions that Grant and his forces found so vexing. An incursion by a naval fleet to take advantage of the seasonal flooding to attempt to land north of Vicksburg -- Grant's seventh failed gambit -- found the decks of Union boats damaged by the tops of submerged trees and scourged by a plague of snakes, possums and cockroaches. A smoky haze lingered as farmers destroyed their cotton harvest in advance of the troops -- a scene that is as much Francis Ford Coppola as Ken Burns.

In Grooms' story, for all that was atavistic and backward-looking about the siege that finally concluded the military campaign, it was a sampler of the horrors of trench warfare to come with World War I. And it offered a bitter "taste of hard war" against those civilians caught in the action. In Vicksburg, the people who fled their homes for dugouts became a civilization of cave-dwellers contending with a hailstorm of exploding artillery shells and whizzing bullets. Their depredations are neatly summed up in the quoted diary entry Groom uses as a chapter title: "Martha says rats are hanging in the market with the mule meat." If Vicksburg seems like a very old story to tell, Groom's lively account has a frighteningly contemporary sheen.